Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC

By Orson Scott Card

April 29, 2007

Don't You Dare Ask for Proof!

In last Sunday's News and Record, columnist Andrew Brod heaped ridicule on
those who dare to contest the religion of global warming. What is his proof?

He doesn't think he needs any. In fact, he's against proof. He likes it when
governments make massive changes without any evidence that those changes
are necessary.

He spends his whole column citing political documents like the reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which is known to have
doctored its reports to conform with ideology, deliberately ignoring the
statements of its own scientists that weren't in line with the desire warnings.

He mentions "migrating maple trees" and "stranded polar bears," though
completely outside the scientific context that these things happen regardless of
whether humans have anything to do with climate change -- they are irrelevant
to that question.

He thinks that the news that only 19 percent of Americans believe that humans
bear no responsibility for climate change is somehow proof of his claims, while
the fact that the number of Republicans in Congress who share that view is
increasing is merely proof that Republicans are idiots.

Let's think about that: Brod thinks that ordinary citizens, who only know what
they're told by the media, can be trusted to know what they're talking about.
While Republican congresspeople, who have access to the reports of all the
scientific experts, with large staffs that can research these matters for them,
are obviously wrong.

Brod mentions in passing that "The news media pay less attention to global-warming skeptics than before." Yet he seems not to make the logical inference
that maybe this is why only 19 percent of Americans believe that humans have
no particular influence on global climate -- they haven't been told about the
evidence.

Maybe if the media were reporting accurately on the state of the pertinent
scientific research, those poll numbers would change.

Brod is one of those who claim that whether global climate change is really
caused by human activities, and whether or not it's really harmful, we ought to
make massive changes in our public policies in order to try to prevent it.

I notice he doesn't mention the consensus, even among true believers in
anthropogenic climate change, that none of the proposals for preventing global
warming are likely to accomplish anything in any reasonable amount of time.

Instead, he says, "According to a recent study by the British government,
which recommended an array of taxes and emission controls, the costs may be
moderate, on the order of 1 percent of global income per year."

He then makes the statistically idiotic extrapolation that this exact percentage
would apply to American households -- only a few hundred bucks a year.

But "global income" costs would not be evenly divided because the changes
would only take place in high-energy-use countries. So Americans would bear
a far higher percentage of the costs. In the thousands, not the hundreds, of
dollars per household.

Brod is deliberately misleading you when he tells you those statistics mean it
would only cost Americans a few hundred dollars per household, and he knows
it.

How many thousands do you want to spend this year on preventing global
warming? And after you find out that there's no proof that humans even cause
it, or that it's even a bad thing, how many thousands do you want to spend
"just in case"?

Two thousand? Surely you can afford two thousand. What about five
thousand?

You're not writing your check. I guess you're not such a true believer after all.

Brod also ignores the fact that the British government report was issued in
support of policy changes that are, by any rational standard, pathetic. The
changes they are making are ludicrously inadequate to change the levels of
greenhouse gases to any significant degree. Given that the results will be near
zero, any costs, however divided, might seem exorbitant.

Brod likens this to insurance, but it is not. Insurance is designed to pay you
money after a loss. It does not prevent a loss. The valid comparison is to
protection money: Somebody comes to you and demands you pay money "or you
might have a fire." You pay the money so that they won't burn you out of
business.

That's what the global-warming protection racket is about: Hey, we can't prove
anything is actually happening, but look how many people we've got to agree
with us! You'd better make a whole bunch of sacrifices which, by coincidence,
exactly coincide with the political agenda of the anti-Western anti-industrial
religion of ecodeism -- or global warming will get you!

Brod actually admits precisely what he's doing, when he says: "Fortunately,
people finally seem to understand the fallacy of requiring proof."

Think about that. He calls it a fallacy to require proof.

Science is worthless without good, solid, reliable evidence. It isn't even science.

And as you look through Brod's entire essay, he offers not one shred of proof
about anything. He only offers politics as usual -- my team has more votes!

But his team has no facts. If his team had facts, he would use them. They
don't, so he can't.

I wonder if Brod, in his job as director of the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro's Office of Business and Economic Research, he has that same
attitude toward proof -- that it's a fallacy to require it.

If so, what value does his "business and economic research" have? Why would
anyone who thinks that requiring proof is a fallacy be hired to do his job? Of
course he can't say with certainty what will happen, but my bet is that he
makes darn sure he provides plenty of proof that his projections of the future
are based on solid evidence about the past.

That is precisely what is missing in the claims about global warming.

But Brod thinks it's a good thing that the media aren't telling you about global-warming skeptics.

How far does this go? What else does he think the media shouldn't be telling
us about?

I think back to another time when the media -- this time in England -- were
committed to concealing facts from their readers and listeners. It was back in
1937, 1938, and 1939.

When Chamberlain and the appeasers in the British government were selling
out Austria and then Czechoslovakia, most newspapers declined to tell their
readers about the Jews who were murdered in Austria after the Nazis took
over; they didn't bother to tell them anything that might cause them to doubt
Neville Chamberlain's program of appeasing the dictators.

The media also didn't think it was worth reporting how badly armed the British
military was, or how heavily the Germans were rearming. After all, that might
promote "alarmism" or pro-war fervor, and "everybody" knew that
Chamberlain's appeasement program was going to bring peace.

The poll statistics were just as good as the ones Brod is citing. Huge majorities
of the public "believed" in appeasement just as huge majorities believe (to some
degree) in anthropogenic global warming. But what they believed and what
was true were, just like today, very far apart -- precisely because the media
concealed the truth.

As a result, when Chamberlain came back from Munich brandishing "peace in
our time," the British public loved him.

Seven years later, with six million Jews and six million other death- and slave-camp victims gone and eastern Europe doomed to be enslaved by Communist
governments imposed by the conquering Russians, not to mention many cities
in England in ruins and many thousands of soldiers and civilians dead, it
would have been hard to find anybody who appreciated the British media's
having kept the truth from them about those lonely "appeasement skeptics."

Isn't it funny how the public has a "right to know" -- except when the media
decides not to tell them?

So you don't hear much about science that gets politically incorrect results.
You don't hear much about global warming skeptics -- or the fact that within
the scientific disciplines actually involved in long-term global climate research
there is a broad consensus growing -- against significant human causes of
global warming.

But Brod approves of the public being deliberately misinformed. He doesn't
want us to look for proof. He wants us to simply do what we're told and think
as we're told. He says "at least the debate is moving in the right direction"
precisely because he thinks there is no debate at all! That's the right direction!

"Instead of pointless arguments about whether we have proof of global
warming, we've started arguing about the costs and benefits of particular
policies." But this is also false, and he knows it.

He does not want to discuss the costs -- he merely dismisses them or denies
them or misuses shaky statistics to trivialize them. He does not want to
discuss the benefits, because there are almost none and he doesn't want us to
know that.

He concludes with this outrageous statement: "I concluded my 1995 column by
saying that it wasn't to late to 'buy insurance' against the future costs of global
warming. It's still not too late. But it will be soon."

Think about those claims: "It's still not too late" and "It will be soon." You will
search his essay in vain for the slightest shred of evidence that it is not too late
or that it will be soon.

In the real world, where people still like to have proof before they make drastic
policy changes, the experts who believe in anthropogenic global warming
generally agree that none of the proposed "solutions" will make any difference.

Meanwhile, the interesting science -- i.e., the science that actually works as an
explanation -- is overwhelmingly heliogenic: The sun is directly and solely
responsible for the overall patterns of warming and cooling that have
dominated Earth, during and between ice ages, for millions of years.

No wonder Brod doesn't want us "requiring proof." He wants you barefoot and
ignorant, folks. So does the rest of his team.

Me, I prefer to listen to people who insist on proof, who are eager to show me
their proof, and eager to have me examine and question their proofs. That's
how the global warming skeptics act. That's also how real scientists act.

Brod is crying wolf. He knows it, he admits it, yet he still expects us to believe
him and run off in pursuit of the imaginary danger.

Meanwhile, there really are human-caused problems that must be dealt with,
and very soon, too. Global warming isn't one of them, but our oil supply
definitely is. I'll be back to that topic next week.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.